The Importance of Dissent in Times of Trouble

Day 1,025, 06:14 • Published in USA USA • by Socialist Freedom Org


This is the first in a short series of excerpts from "PQ's Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts from The Second Millenium of the New World"... Enjoy!


THE IMPORTANCE OF DISSENT IN TIMES OF TROUBLE

The right to dissent is a fundamental requirement of democracy. The willingness to express a differing opinion is inextricably bound up with the maintenance of a free society.

The key to understanding the conflict between freedom of expression and the silencing of dissent can be found in an analysis of the role of stress – particularly extreme stress - in individual and group life. A little stress is good for us. Stress stimulates growth, development and innovation. But too much stress – including stress that lasts too long - is toxic.



Organizational stress compromises the safety and security of a system. Within organizations -- such as a national government in the New World -- it is the decision-making, problem solving and conflict resolution methods that help a system routinely manage emotions that can become destructive. If properly channeled these methods greatly assist organizational functioning when they are directed to constructive purpose and the achievement of organizational goals. But an overload of emotional arousal can easily interfere with cognitive functioning and a rational action response.

If they are to be successful, all organizations must develop a vision that propels them into an imagined future.

When confronted with extreme stress, individual function changes rapidly in order to accommodate to the stressful situation with responses that are more likely to promote survival. We enter a state of high arousal and hypervigilance with attention directed at whatever is the source of the danger.

Attention is directed at the source of the threat and other environmental information is ignored as extraneous and irrelevant to the immediate danger. An urgent need to take action compels us to fight or to flee. Aggression increases dramatically and therefore violent action is far more likely while impulse control plummets since it interferes with rapid response.



When we are under threat, we experience an increased attachment behavior directed at those individuals and groups to which we have already formed an attachment. In stressed groups, a leader is likely to arise and in an emergency we are likely to follow the leader who most convincingly asserts superior knowledge about how to survive the emergency.

Human groups tend to strongly silence dissent and externalize the conflict by projecting the conflict onto an external enemy and the more strongly the convincing leader urges a group to resolve its conflicts by these methods, the more strongly the group becomes bonded to the leader. Since the increased group aggression must be projected outward, overt violence against the perceived enemy is more likely to occur.



When the complexity of a threat requires a more complex response than an individual or group can summon under the impact of stress; or when the threat itself become chronic and repetitive, the instincts described above can become ineffectual and even disastrous. Escalating group responses turns a evolutionary survival mechanism into an evolutionary time bomb. Chronic exposure to danger creates chronic hyperarousal in overly stressed individuals. In this state, people respond to even minor threats as if they were major threats and are likely to react accordingly.

The numbing of emotions simultaneously reduces concerns about one’s own well-being and reduces the capacity for empathy with others. The employment of aggressive responses becomes chronic leading to a state of chronic conflict and the need to seek out perpetual enemies. As the need to justify previous actions and defend faulty judgements expands, explanations become increasingly bizarre. The leaders who have made these faulty judgements become both bullying and deceptive, needing to lie not only to their constituents but to themselves.

Dissent must be suppressed using ever more coercive and forceful means because surfacing the previous and present conflicts now is seen by flawed leaders as more dangerous and destabilizing than ever before.



Complex problems require complex solutions and complex solutions are never the product of a single mind. For complex solutions to emerge in any situation, there must be sufficient safety for the individuals within a group to voice divergent opinions and challenge the existing status quo. There must be sufficient calm and mutual respect for human cognitive function to work at peak efficiency and sophistication – conditions impossible under the impact of chronic stress.

To counteract the effects of stress a leader must seek out and welcome dissent and guide a group toward the integration of multiple points of view. The dissenting voice in any group contains the necessary seeds for the solutions of complex problems because the dissenters contain in embryonic form, ideas that are new or previously discarded by the group faced with a problem that will not budge. Without recognizing the dissenting voice, a group is quite likely to follow a leader, like lemmings, over a cliff.

For all these reasons, democracy is a necessity, not a luxury. Democracy is the best method yet that human beings have evolved for managing complex problems with a minimum of violence. The more democratic principles are compromised, the greater the likelihood of poor decisions, faulty judgements, escalating levels of conflict, and ultimately violence. Dissent – and the engagement in creative conflict – is the cornerstone of democratic processes and in an ever more complex world, silencing the dissenting voice imperils human survival.






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